The Pekin Target

8: Li-fei

A gun at close quarters is always dangerous because of the unpredictable factors involved: the state of the opponent's nerves and the degree of his fear and the position of the safety catch and the distances and angles that will govern the trajectory of the shot if the gun is fired. Timing, above all, will decide the difference between success or failure.

She was only just inside the door and well within my reach so I hit for the wrist and the gun span across the floor as she cried out in pain and came at me with her lacquered claws, hooking for my eyes with the soft ferocity of a cat as her scent wafted over me and her face was held close to mine, the faint light from the street glowing in her eyes as she fought me, her breath hissing in fury.

She was hardly bigger than a child, but it took a few moments to subdue her, and even with both slender arms locked behind her back she still went on trying to struggle. I left things like that for a couple of minutes, giving her time to think; the Astra Cub.22 was lying on the Numda rug between the window and the bed and her dark head was turned in its direction; her breath came painfully in the quiet of the room as she began whispering to me in Chinese — to me or to herself or her gods, I couldn't tell.

I said in English: "I'm going to hand you over to the police." I was Clive Ingram, an innocent travel agent, and it was outrageous to find myself attacked like this in my own hotel room.

She didn't answer, but stood quivering with her head still angled to watch the gun. I was aware of warm silk against me, and of the fury that was still in her as I kept the lock on her arms; I could feel blood creeping on my face where her nails had torn the skin close to my eyes, and I knew that if I let her go she'd fly to the gun or spin round and try to blind me.

I told her again that I was going to call the police, this time speaking in French, and her small head jerked upwards as she tried to look at me.

In the same language she said: "I shall kill you." Her breath shuddered out of her with the force of what she was saying.

"Why?"

"One day I shall kill you, however long it takes. Do you understand?"

"Not really." She knew I could snap her fragile arms and finish with it, but she also knew that a civilised male of the species wouldn't want to do that. If I let her trade on it she wouldn't give me a second's chance. "My name is Ingram," I told her wearily, "and I'm an English travel agent on a visit to Seoul. You're mistaking me for someone else." I waited, feeling the small vibration of her heartbeat as her fury went on forcing its rhythm; but her breath was slowing now, and I was encouraged. I wanted to get her out of here, and sleep; I hadn't slept since the flight out from London two nights ago, and the death struggle in Pekin had left me bruised and drained.

It occurred to me that this woman hadn't seen me very clearly in the gloom of the unlit room, so I pulled her backwards and felt for the light switch with my shoulder, moving it down; then I walked her across to the mirror on the dressing-table and for a moment we stared at each other; she was a pure Chinese, her delicate bone structure lit and shadowed by the lamps on the wall and her cinnamon eyes glistening; I looked less elegant, with streaks of blood on my face.

"You see," I told her, "I'm no one you know."

She stared at me for another few moments and then broke, her head going down and the tears coming and her slight body shaking under my hands; and when I released her she covered her face and sank slowly to the floor, the gold embroidery of her long silk hanbok glowing in the light as her black hair fell forward and revealed the pale ivory of her neck. I left her there, going to pick up the gun. She'd come close to killing me and by mistake, and now the reaction was setting in.

For a long time she didn't move, and when the worst of the sobbing was over I asked her gently: "What is your name?"

She turned her tear-wet face. "Soong Li-fei."

"What were you doing in my room?"

I was holding the gun, its trigger-guard hanging from one finger; but she didn't even glance at it.

"It was a mistake," she said, so softly that I only just heard; her French was cultured, with the accent of Touraine.

"What kind of mistake, Li-fei?"

Slowly she straightened up, wiping at her face with the back of her small hands. "It was for my brother. They killed my brother."

The wind was rattling one of the shutters, and I went across to the windows and secured the stay. Her handbag was on the floor near the door, where she'd dropped it; it was of the same dark eau-de-nil silk as her dress. I took it over to her and she found a handkerchief and blew her nose a few times, turning away from me. When she was quiet again I said:

"They killed your brother?" I went over to the handbasin and washed the blood off my face. "Who did?"

"This is the wrong room," she said, "or you are the wrong person. Please let me go now."

"Someone told you I killed your brother?"

"No." She put away her handkerchief and clicked the bag shut. "It was a mistake, m'sieur. I apologise."

"Then someone must have told you that the man who killed your brother would be coming to this room tonight."

"No."

"It's got to be one way or the other, Li-fei."

She watched me with reddened eyes, the last of the tears still glistening on their lids. "I had the room number wrong."

That was possible, but I had to make sure. In the initial phase of a mission I like my privacy.

"Who gave you the room number?"

"I forgot." She was lying with a child's simplicity now, embarrassed, wanting to go. Her lip was trembling and she was making an effort to keep control; it occurred to me that she'd cried tonight from disappointment because I'd been the wrong man and she hadn't been able to avenge her brother.

"When did they kill your brother?" I asked her.

On a sudden sob that she couldn't stop — "Yesterday." I went across to her quickly and held her small cold hands, and she looked up at me in surprise.

"Was this in Seoul?" I asked her.

"No. In Pekin."

My nape crept; but she'd said yesterday, not this morning. "How did they do it?"

She opened the little silk bag quickly, showing me a news cutting folded many times. It was in Korean. "I can't read it," I said.

"It says — " but there was another sob, and she gripped my hands tightly, refusing to break down again. "It says it was a ritual murder, on the steps of a temple." She thrust the small wad of paper back into her bag and closed it.

I felt the tension leaving me. "What was his name?"

"Soong Yongshen."

"I'm sorry. Do you live with your parents?"

"I have no parents."

And no brother now. "I'll see you home," I told her. "Where do you live?"

"No. Just let me go, please.

The monsoon sang through the street outside, banging at the shutters and swinging signs on their rusty hinges. It would blow her away, scattering her like fragments of porcelain.

"I'll get a taxi for you downstairs."

"No. I don't live very far away."

I took out the gun and put it into her hands, and her ivory fingers closed round it clumsily, as if she'd forgotten what it was, and what it was for.

"Thank you."

"I'd throw it away, Li-fei."

"No," she said at once. "I will find him, and kill him."

"Where did you get it?"

"From a friend."

I went with her to the door. "What do you do?"

"I'm an official interpreter for the airline."

"French and Chinese. No English?"

"No. Japanese. There are so many who speak English." We were by the door now but I didn't open it yet; I'd been giving her time to recover. "What did your brother do?"

She caught her breath but steadied. "He worked for — for some kind of organisation. I'm not sure."

"Why would anyone want to kill him?"

"He did something wrong. It was something to do with the dreadful thing in Pekin."

"What dreadful thing?"

"The bombing at the funeral."

Blown.

As if from somewhere outside myself I noted that my voice didn't change in the slightest, but my skin was creeping along the whole length of my spine as the nerves reacted.

"What did your brother do wrong, would you think?"

"I don't know."

I'd been in this city three hours and no one had followed me in from the Chinese mainland and only Ferris knew where I was staying and already I was blown and I didn't even know how to start believing it.

She wanted to go but I kept her.

"How do you know he did something wrong?"

"I was told." My voice hadn't changed and my face hadn't changed but her eyes were wider now as she watched me, her own nerves picking up the alarm in mine. There was nothing I could do about that.

"Who told you?"

"It would be dangerous for me to say."

"That doesn't worry me."

She was frightened now, underneath the perfection of the pale porcelain skin, underneath the elegance of the softly articulated French. There was nothing I could do about that either: it wasn't my fault that I'd walked in here at gunpoint tonight.

"It would be dangerous for me," she said, "to tell you anything."

"I think you're running with the wrong set, Li-fei." I chose the Parisian idiom of the milieu and she looked suddenly bitter, her head going down.

"Yes. There are things happening that I don't — that I don't understand. But I understand that my brother is dead."

I listened to every word and the way she said it; I watched her cinnamon eyes and the way they changed when she spoke of her brother and when she spoke of other things, the ones she didn't understand; I listened and watched for the slightest sign that she wasn't in point of fact Soong Li-fei, an official interpreter for Korean Airlines, but an exquisite and deadly emissary of the Tung Triad who'd been sent here to trap me with the performance of an accomplished actress. There was no sign; but my mind was clouded with fatigue and the dizzying certainty of the impossible: that I was blown and within the next hour would have to go to ground and somehow stay alive.

I'd tested her, but it had been crude: when I'd put the loaded gun back into her hands the safety-catch had been on and the whole of my body's musculature had been tensed and prepared to hit the thing away again if she changed her mind and tried for a second time. I'd have to test her again when the chance came, before I could be sure. I asked her now:

"Did someone tell you I'd killed your brother? I mean did they give me a name?"

"No."

"What did they say? How did they put it?" I gave an edge to my tone and she heard it, and looked trapped.

"You are nothing to do with this," she said in sudden despair. "It was a mistake — you are not the man I'm looking for. Please let me go, and I promise you'll never see me again."

Choice: threaten her or make use of her. I could threaten to get the police here and accuse her of attempted murder if she didn't tell me what I wanted to know; but she might still decide it was safer to keep silent, whatever I chose to do: I had no means of knowing how unyielding she might be, how enduring, at the dictates of the torment that was driving her; the shock of her brother's death would have unbalanced her for a time.

"All right," I told her, "it was a mistake. Go home and give that gun back to your friend, and forget about vengeance; it could get you life imprisonment."

She closed her eyes for a moment in relief and then stood back as I opened the door for her, giving me a formal little bow and saying something softly in Chinese and then in French. "I thank you for your great kindness. May good fortune always be with you."

I went down the stairs with her past the great brass gong and left her at the entrance doors, which were still open to the warmth of the night. She walked down the steps into the windy street, and didn't turn her head.

Here in the old quarter of the city the streets were narrow, sometimes no wider than alleyways, and Soong Li-fei slipped through them as if carried along on the warm rain-smelling gusts of the monsoon, the dark silk of her dress shimmering in the lamplight as she vanished at a corner and reappeared as I turned after her; she had looked over her shoulder twice since I'd begun following her, but she couldn't have seen me: I'd been working my way- from cover to cover through the shadows of the fluttering fan-palms and past bicycles knocked over by the wind; the few people I passed walked with their heads down against the gusts, hurrying, some of them dodging into the small restaurants that were scenting the night air with the smell of kimchi and sinsollo.

"Hey, mister — you wanna girl?"

"No."

"You wanna boy?"

"No."

The wind sent another bicycle over with a clang from its bell. She had told me at least this much truth: she didn't live far from my hotel; she was already slowing her pace at the end of a narrow street of shop-houses and turning to go into a doorway; then a man came from the shadows and stopped her.

Contact.

He was asking her something and she was replying, explaining, shaking her head. He didn't think she was a prostitute: in this quarter she was too pretty and too elegant. I watched them from the distance of a stone's throw, keeping in the cover of shadow.

This was a contact, the first I'd made in security since I'd left London, the end of a thread that could lead me through the night and the wind to Tung Kuo-feng. But it wasn't going to be easy: there was the length of the street between the contact and me, and he was close to a turning; there would have to be some luck.

Soong Li-fei was already going into the doorway, leaving the man standing there alone; then he moved, and so did I, at first walking fast and keeping to cover and then breaking into a soft run as he vanished beyond the corner. I ran hard now, taking the risk that he'd hear me above the noise of the wind's rattling among the shutters and along the tiled roofs, but there was no sign of him as I swung into the alley at the intersection; it ran for fifty yards and opened into a small square filled with trees and parked horseless carts and a few benches. There was limitless cover for him here but I didn't think he'd used it; I didn't think he'd seen or heard me; I thought he'd simply moved into a doorway and gone inside, into one of a dozen buildings and with no clue as to which.

I walked twice from the square to the intersection and back, desperate for the sign of a half-open doorway, a silhouette against a light, the sound of a voice; but he'd gone. There was no point in my staying; if I saw him now I wouldn't recognise him for certain as the man I'd seen talking to Li-fei; in the distance and the lamplight I'd seen nothing more of him than that he was young bareheaded Asian in dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt.

I went back to the hotel the way I'd come, checking now and then to make sure I was alone. The big carved entrance doors at the top of the steps were still wide open, but there was no clerk at the desk. I looked for a copy of the Korean Herald in English behind the counter but found nothing; I'd get one tomorrow; I wanted to see the report of Soong Yongshen's death on the steps of the temple in Pekin before I signalled Ferris with information.

The time by the American Express clock on the wall was just gone eleven as I went up the stairs, my shoes quiet on the marble. Rock music was coming faintly from somewhere, and a woman's liquid laughter; a door banged in the street outside, or it was the wind shaking something; a sound was coming from the big brass gong on the wall, so low that it was hardly more than a vibration as it trapped the other sounds and held them like an unceasing echo.

Sleep. It was all I wanted now. She'd been going to kill me but it hadn't happened, and I was still here. Someone had made contact with her, someone who could have led me to Tung, but I'd lost him; so be it. Tomorrow was another day and with luck I'd outlive this one. But I'd get no sleep until I'd gone to ground; it was just the thought of it that slowed me a little as I climbed to the second floor, my senses lulled by the strange murmuration of the gong. The fatigue curve is not constant; it dips faster as time goes on. But I wasn't totally relaxed; one must never be totally relaxed in a red sector, if life is still held to be sweet.

Light was filtering through the grilled windows of the stairwell, throwing the restless shadows of the fan-palms in the square outside; faintly through the coloured glass I could hear them rustling; my own shadow came for a moment against the wall as I turned on the curving stairs.

The woman had stopped laughing. There was still within me the degree of alertness necessary for the memory to remain aware that she had been laughing before, and now had stopped. I was also noting other things, as the impressions of light and sound and touch went shuttling secretly across and across the undefined borderline between the conscious and the subconscious, arousing the interplay between the primitive and the modern brain that would turn incoming data into decision when the need came.

I reached the second-floor passage, my shadow moving again on the wall, this time with the other shadow as if we were dancing; but we were not dancing; this was more serious, and as time slowed down I was aware only of the primitive animal-brain impressions: the flare of alarm along the nerves and their response; the swift rushing of adrenalin and the contraction of muscle; the locking of the breath as the strength of the organism gathered with the force of a storm and then broke loose. Nothing was thought out; everything was done in the light of ancient wisdom, tapping the store of racial memory wherein it is recorded, for all of us, what must be done to survive when there is no time to think.

Something snapped, possibly his arm. I remember very little about it, but that first sound was sharp. For an instant I felt his breath fanning against my face before the force in me, which was in essence the force of the living creature refusing to be killed, reached its peak and he span slowly with his back curving against the low balustrade and his arms flying upwards, the hands set in the shape of empty claws; then he was flung away from me and began going down as I watched, down the lamplit stairwell, his body turning slowly until one of his shoulders hit the huge brass gong and broke it away from the wall, so that it fell with him like a giant discus, striking the marble floor below and sounding his death knell with a clangour that shook the night.